Parish Notices #9

Had a lot of hits on an old post of mine this week. The post went way back to 2006 and the track everyone was searching for was "Just A Little Overcome" by the Nightingales. I wondered, why the sudden interest?

It turns out this track was featured in Episode Four of a new TV series called Treme (pronounced tre-may I think). The series started last month on HBO in the States. Named after a district of New Orleans you can read all about the series on it's own Wiki page. This sounds like a must see series not least because it would appear to have a great soundtrack which is documented here. Let's hope it gets an airing in the UK soon.

Completely disconnected from the Nightingales track, my old post initially rambled on a bit about the stratospheric amounts of money Northern Soulies are prepared to pay for obscure records from the 60s.
To save you ploughing through all that I'm re-posting here what I said about the The Nightingales when I finally got 'round to them (you are of course welcome to read the original post in full if you want).

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..... Tommy Tate is the lead singer on this track (as I learnt recently while idly browsing John Ridley’s page at the Soul of The Net). This is from a strong compilation of Stax output “The Stax Story” that’s been in my collection for many years. The sleeve notes of this album say of the Nightingales and this track: “Originally a gospel group, the Dixie Nightingales, who worked steadily, weekend in weekend out, throughout the fifties (and recorded for Pepper and Nashboro Records), signed to Stax’s new subsidiary gospel label Chalice. In ’67 they had become Ollie & The Nightingales (featuring the lead voice of Ollie Hoskins) and turned their scorching, testifying style to non-religious material. The group had hits (“I Got A Sure Thing” 1968, and “I’ve Got A Feeling” 1969) before Ollie left to record solo (first with Stax, later for the MGM distributed Pride label) and the Nightingales turned in “Just A Little Overcome” an undiscovered flipside classic released in May ’71. Listen hard, it’ll move any soul”. Indeed.

In fact it was B side to “I Don’t Want To Be Like My Daddy” and you can probably pick this up for less than a tenner. On CD you can find the track on an Ollie & The Nightingales compilation.

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It's worth another listen:

Nightingales - Just A Little Overcome 1971  

Now go and buy "Tommy Tate - I'm So Satisfied: The Complete KoKo Recordings, and More" which also includes this track.